With the advent of mass electronic communication and commerce, a need has arisen with respect to a simple way to transmit funds electronically for payment or other purposes in a completely secure manner. Furthermore, with the growing placement of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in businesses, and the growing use of personal finance computers programs by individuals, there has arisen a need to transmit the descriptive data related to these systems and programs in a completely secure manner. What is more, although electronic commerce provides many conveniences, it lags behind paper and face-to-face transactions in terms of trust. Said more plainly, with electronic commerce, it difficult to know “who one is dealing with”.
Current methods of transmitting funds and descriptive data have proven vulnerable to a variety of attacks by criminals. For healthcare companies, whose descriptive data often contains patient records, keeping descriptive data persistently and pervasively safe from attack and exploitation regardless of where in the internet cloud or regardless of how many parties in a vertical or horizontal supply chain receive this information is particularly important. In fact, with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), it is a legal obligation.
Another flaw of current methods is that descriptive data, such as ERP-related data, flows separately from the funds transfers to which they relate. Managerial chaos can ensue, for example, when the arrival of ERP-related data lags behind the arrival of payment data. Under such circumstances a company could ship products to another company and receive payment for those products, but have their ERP system tell them that payment had not been received and that the products had not shipped. Based on the erroneous ERP data, the company might believe that they had more product stock than they actually did, leading to incorrect business decisions.